'Ready for some more, little woman?'
Cecile in a furtive squirrel-like way seized the piece and was retiring with it, when Sandy, beside himself, jumped from his stool, rushed at his cousin and beat her wildly with his small fists.
'Yo're a geedy thing—a geedy 'gustin' thing!' he cried, sobbing partly because he wanted the cake, still more because, after his exaltation on Hannah's knee, he had been so unaccountably neglected. To see Cecile battening on a second piece while he was denied a first was more than could be borne.
'You little viper, you!' exclaimed Louie, and springing up, she swept across to Sandy, and boxed his ears smartly, just as she was accustomed to box Cecile's, whenever the fancy took her.
The child raised a piercing cry, and David caught him up.
'Give him to me, David, give him to me,' cried Lucy, who had almost upset the tea-table in her rush to her child. 'I'll see whether that sister of yours shall beat and abuse my boy in my own house! Oh, she may beat her own child as much as she pleases, she does it all day long! If she were a poor person she would be had up.'
Her face glowed with passion. The exasperation of many days spoke in her outburst. David, himself trembling with anger, in vain tried to quiet her and Sandy.
'Ay, I reckon she maks it hot wark for them 'at ha to live wi her,' said Hannah audibly, looking round on the scene with a certain enjoyment which contrasted with the panic and distress of the rest.
Louie, who was holding Cecile—also in tears—in her arms, swept her fierce, contemptuous gaze from Lucy to her ancient enemy.
'You must be putting inyourword, must you?—you old toad, you—you that robbed us of our money till your own husband was ashamed of you!'
And, totally regardless of the presence of Dora and Ancrum, and of the efforts made to silence her by Dora or by the flushed and unhappy Reuben, she descended on her foe. She flung charge after charge in Hannah's face, showing the minutest and most vindictive memory for all the sordid miseries of her childhood; and then when her passion had spent itself on her aunt, she returned to Lucy, exulting in the sobs and the excitement she had produced. In vain did David try either to silence her or to take Lucy away. Nothing but violence could have stopped the sister's tongue; his wife, under a sort of fascination of terror and rage, would not move. Flinging all thoughts of her dependence on David—of the money she had come to ask—of her leave-taking on the morrow—to the winds, Louie revenged herself amply for her week's unnatural self-control, and gave full rein to a mad propensity which had been gradually roused and spurred to ungovernable force by the trivial incidents of the afternoon. She made mock of Lucy's personal vanity; she sneered at her attempts to ape her betters, shrilly declaring that no one would ever take her for anything else than what she was, the daughter of a vulgar cheese-paring old hypocrite; and, finally, she attacked Sandy as a nasty, greedy, abominable little monkey, not fit to associate with her child, and badly in want of the stick.
Then slowly she retreated to the door out of breath, the wild lightnings of her eyes flashing on them still. David was holding the hysterical Lucy, while Dora was trying to quiet Sandy. Otherwise a profound silence had fallen on them all, a silence which seemed but to kindle Louie's fury the more.
'Ah, you think you've got him in your power, him and his money, you little white-livered cat!' she cried, standing in the doorway, and fixing Lucy with a look beneath which her sister-in-law quailed, and hid her face on David's arm. 'You think you'll stop him giving it to them that have a right to look to him? Perhaps you'd better look out; perhaps there are people who know more about him than you. Do you think he would ever have looked at you, you little powsement, if he hadn't been taken on the rebound?'
She gave a mad laugh as she flung out the old Derbyshire word of abuse, and stood defying them, David and all. David strode forward and shut the door upon her. Then he went tenderly up to his wife, and took her and Sandy into the library.
The sound of Cecile's wails could be heard in the distance. The frightened Reuben turned and looked at his wife. She had grown paler even than before, but her eyes were all alive.
'A racklesome, natterin' creetur as ivir I seed,' she said calmly; 'I allus telt tha, Reuben Grieve, what hoo'd coom to. It's bred in her—that's yan thing to be hodden i' mind. But I'll shift her in double quick-sticks if she ever cooms meddlin' i'myhouse, Reuben Grieve—soa yo know.'
'She oughtn't to stay here,' said Ancrum in a quick undertone to Dora; 'she might do that mother and child a mischief.'
Dora sat absorbed in her pity for David, in her passionate sympathy for this home that was as her own.
'She is going to-morrow, thank God!' she said with a long breath; 'oh, what an awful woman!'
Ancrum looked at her with a little sad smile.
'Whom are you sorry for?' he asked. 'Those two in there?' and he nodded towards the library. 'Think again, Miss Dora. There is one face that will haunt me whenever I think of this—the face of that French child.'
All the afternoon visitors dispersed. The hours passed. Lucy, worn out, had gone to bed with a crying which seemed to have in it some new and heavy element she would not speak of, even to David. The evening meal came, and there was no sign or sound from that room upstairs where Louie had locked herself in.
David stood by the fire in the dining-room, his lips sternly set. He had despatched a servant to Louie's door with an offer to send up food for her and Cecile. But the girl had got no answer. Was he bound to go—bound to bring about the possible renewal of a degrading scene?
At this moment Lizzie, the little nurse, tapped at the door.
'If you please, sir—'
'Yes. Anything wrong with Master Sandy?'
David went to the door in a tremor. 'He won't go to sleep, sir. He wants you, and I'm afraid he'll disturb mistress again.'
David ran upstairs.
'Sandy, what do you want?'
Sandy was crying violently, far down under the bedclothes. When David drew him out, he was found to be grasping a piece of crumbling cake, sticky with tears.
'It's Cecile's cake,' he sobbed into his father's ear. 'I want to give it her.'
And in fact, after his onslaught upon her, Cecile had dropped the offending cake, which he had instantly picked up the moment before Louie struck him. He had held it tight gripped ever since, and repentance was busy in his small heart.
David thought a moment.
'Come with me, Sandy,' he said at last, and, wrapping up the child in an old shawl that hung near, he carried him off to Louie's door. 'Louie!' he called, after his knock, in a low voice, for he was uncomfortably aware that his household was on the watch for developments.
For a while there was no answer. Sandy, absorbed in the interest of the situation, clung close to his father and stopped crying.
At last Louie suddenly flung the door wide open.
'What do you want?' she said defiantly, with the gesture and bearing of a tragic actress. She was, however, deadly white, and David, looking past her, saw that Cecile was lying wide awake in her little bed.
'Sandy wants to give Cecile her cake,' he said quietly, 'and to tell her that he is sorry for striking her.'
He carried his boy up to Cecile. A smile flashed over the child's worn face. She held out her little arms. David, infinitely touched, laid down Sandy, and the children crooned together on the same pillow, he trying to stuff the cake into Cecile's mouth, she gently refusing.
'She's ill,' said Louie abruptly, 'she's feverish—I want a doctor.'
'We can get one directly,' he said. 'Will you come down and have some food? Lucy has gone to bed. If Lizzie comes and sits by the children, perhaps they will go to sleep. I can carry Sandy back later.'
Louie paused irresolutely. Then she went up to the bed, knelt down by it, and took Cecile in her arms.
'You can take him away,' she said, pointing to Sandy. 'I will put her to sleep. Don't you send me anything to eat. I want a doctor. And if you won't order a fly for me at twenty minutes to nine to-morrow, I will go out myself, that's all.'
'Louie!' he cried, holding out his hand to her in despair, 'why will you treat us in this way—what have we done to you?'
'Never you mind,' she said sullenly, gathering the child to her and confronting him with steady eyes. There was a certain magnificence in their wide unconscious despair—in this one fierce passion.
She and Lucy did not meet again. In the morning David paid her her hundred pounds, and took her and Cecile to the station, a doctor having seen the child the night before, and prescribed medicine, which had given her a quiet night. Louie barely thanked him for the money. She was almost silent and still very pale.
Just before they parted, the thought of the tyranny of such a nature, of the life to which she was going back, wrung the brother's heart. The outrage of the day before dropped from his mind as of no account, effaced by sterner realities.
'Write to me, Louie!' he said to her just as the train was moving off; 'I could always come if there was trouble—or Dora.'
She did not answer, and her hand dropped from his. But he remembered afterwards that her eyes were fixed upon him, as long as the train was in sight, and the picture of her dark possessed look will be with him to the end.
It was a warm April Sunday. Lucy and Dora were pacing up and down in the garden, and Lucy was talking in a quick, low voice.
'Oh! there was something, Dora. You know as well as I do there was something. That awful woman didn't say that for nothing. I suppose he'd tell me if I asked him.'
'Then why don't you ask him?' said Dora, with a little frown.
Lucy gathered a sprig of budding lilac, and restlessly stripped off its young green.
'It isn't very pleasant,' she said at last, slowly. 'I dare say it's silly to expect your husband never to have looked at anybody else—'
She paused again, unable to explain herself. Dora glanced at her, and was somewhat struck by her thin and worn appearance. She had often, moreover, seemed to her cousin to be fretting during these last weeks. Not that there was much difference in her ways with David and Sandy. But her small vanities, prejudices, and passions were certainly less apparent of late; she ordered her two servants about less; she was less interested in her clothes, less eager for social amusement. It was as though something clouding and dulling had passed over a personality which was naturally restless and vivacious.
Yet it was only to-day, in the course of some conversation about Louie, of whom nothing had been heard since her departure, that Lucy had for the first time broken silence on the subject of those insolent words of her sister-in-law, which Ancrum and Dora had listened to with painful shock, while to Reuben and Hannah, pre-occupied with their own long-matured ideas of Louie, they had been the mere froth of a venomous tongue.
'Why didn't you ask him about it at first—just after?' Dora resumed.
'I didn't want to,' said Lucy, after a minute, and then would say no more. But she walked along, thinking, unhappily, of the moment when David had taken her into the library to be out of the sound of Louie's rage; of her angry desire to ask him questions, checked by a childish fear she could not analyse, as to what the answers might be; of his troubled, stormy face; and of the tender ways by which he tried to calm and comfort her. It had seemed to her that once or twice he had been on the point of saying something grave and unusual, but in the end he had refrained. Louie had gone away; their everyday life had begun again; he had been very full, in the intervals of his hard daily business, of the rebuilding of the James Street court, and of the apprentices' school; and, led by a variety of impulses—by a sense of jeopardised possession and a conscience speaking with new emphasis and authority—she had taken care that he should talk to her about both; she had haunted him in the library, and her presence there, once the signal of antagonism and dispute, had ceased to have any such meaning for him. Her sympathy was not very intelligent, and there was at times a childish note of sulkiness and reluctance in it; she was extremely ready to say, 'I told you so,' if anything went wrong; but, nevertheless, there was a tacit renunciation at the root of her new manner to him which he perfectly understood, and rewarded in his own ardent, affectionate way.
As she sauntered along in this pale gleam of sun, now drinking in the soft April wind, now stooping to look at the few clumps of crocuses and daffodils which were pushing through the blackened earth, Lucy had once more a vague sense that her life this spring—this past year—had been hard. It was like the feeling of one who first realises the intensity of some long effort or struggle in looking back upon it. Her little life had been breathed into by a divine breath, and growth, expansion, had brought a pain and discontent she had never known before.
Dora meanwhile had her own thoughts. She was lost in memories of that first talk of hers with David Grieve after his return from Paris, with the marks of his fierce, mysterious grief fresh upon him; then, pursuing her recollection of him through the years, she came to a point of feeling where she said, with sudden energy, throwing her arm round Lucy, and taking up the thread of their conversation:—
'I wouldn't let what Louie said worry you a bit, Lucy. Of course, she wanted to make mischief; but you know, and I know, what sort of a man David has been since you and he were married. That'll be enough for you, I should think.'
Lucy flushed. She had once possessed very little reticence, and had been quite ready to talk her husband over, any day and all day, with Dora. But now, though she would begin in the old way, there soon came a point when something tied her tongue.
This time she attacked the lilac-bushes again with a restless hand.
'Why, I thought you were shocked at his opinions,' she said, proudly.
Dora sighed. Her conscience had not waited for Lucy's remark to make her aware of the constant perplexity between authority and natural feeling into which David's ideals were perpetually throwing her.
'They make one very sad,' she said, looking away. 'But we must believe that God, who sees everything, judges as we cannot do.'
Lucy fired up at once. It annoyed her to have Dora making spiritual allowance for David in this way.
'I don't believe God wants anything but that people should be good,' she said. 'I am sure there are lots of things like that in the New Testament.'
Dora shook her head slowly. '"He that hath not the Son, hath not life,"' she said under her breath, a sudden passion leaping to her eye.
Lucy looked at her indignantly. 'I don't agree with you, Dora—there! And it all depends on what things mean.'
'The meaning is quite plain,' said Dora, with rigid persistence. 'O Lucy, don't be led away. I missed you at early service this morning.'
The look she threw her cousin melted into a pathetic and heavenly reproach.
'Well, I know,' said Lucy, ungraciously, 'I was tired. I don't know what's wrong with me these last weeks; I can't get up in the morning.'
Dora only looked grieved. Lucy understood that her plea seemed to her cousin too trivial and sinful to be noticed.
'Oh! I dare say I'd go,' she said in her own mind, defiantly, 'ifhewent.'
Aloud, she said:—
'Dora, just look at this cheek of mine; I can't think what the swelling is.'
And she turned her right cheek to Dora, pointing to a lump, not discoloured, but rather large, above the cheek-bone. Dora stopped, and looked at it carefully.
'Yes, I had noticed it,' she said. 'It is odd. Can't you account for it in any way?'
'No. It's been coming some little while. David says I must ask Dr. Mildmay about it. I don't think I shall. It'll go away. Oh! there they are.'
As she spoke, David and Sandy, who had been out for a Sunday walk together, appeared on the steps of the garden-door. David waved his hat to his wife, an example immediately followed by Sandy, who twisted his Scotch cap madly, and then set off running to her.
Lucy looked at them both with a sudden softening and brightening which gave her charm. David came up to her, ran his arm through hers, and began to give her a laughing account of Sandy's behaviour. The April wind had flushed him, tumbled his black hair, and called up spring lights in the eyes, which had been somewhat dimmed by overmuch sedentary work and a too small allowance of sleep. His plenitude of virile energy, the glow of health and power which hung round him this afternoon, did but make Lucy seem more languid and faded as she hung upon him, smiling at his stories of their walk and of Sandy's antics.
He broke off in the middle, and looked at her anxiously.
'She isn't the thing, is she, Dora? I believe she wants a change.'
'Oh! thank you!' cried Lucy, ironically—'with all Sandy's spring things and my own to look to, and some new shirts to get for you, and the spring cleaning to see to. Much obliged to you.'
'All those things, madam,' said David, patting her hand, 'wouldn't matter twopence, if it should please your lord and master to order you off. And if this fine weather goes on, you'll have to take advantage of it. By the way, I met Mildmay, and asked him to come in and see you.'
Lucy reddened.
'Why, there's nothing,' she said, pettishly. 'This'll go away directly.' Instinctively she put up her hand to her cheek.
'Oh! Mildmay won't worry you,' said David; 'he'll tell you what's wrong at once. You know you like him.'
'Well, I must go,' said Dora.
They understood that she had a mill-girls' Bible class at half-past five, and an evening service an hour later, so they did not press her to stay. Lucy kissed her, and Sandy escorted her halfway to the garden-door, giving her a breathless and magniloquent account of the 'hy'nas and kangawoos' she might expect to find congregated in the Merton Road outside. Dora, who was somewhat distressed by his powers of imaginative fiction, would not 'play up' as his father did, and he left her half-way to run back to David, who was always ready to turn road and back garden into 'Africa country' at a moment's notice, and people it to order with savages, elephants, boomerangs, kangaroos, and all other possible or impossible things that Sandy might chance to want.
Dora, looking back from the garden, saw them all three in a group together—Sandy tugging at his mother's skirts, and shouting at the top of his voice; David's curly black head bent over his wife, who was gathering her brown shawl round her throat, as though the light wind chilled her. But there was no chill in her look. That, for the moment, as she swayed between husband and child, had in it the qualities of the April sun—a brightness and promise all the more radiant by comparison with the winter or the cloud from which it had emerged.
Dora went home as quickly as tramcar and fast walking could take her. She still lived in the same Ancoats rooms with her shirt-making friend, who had kept company, poor thing! for four years with a young man, and had then given him up with anguish because he was not 'the sort of man she'd been taking him for,' though no one but Dora had ever known what qualities or practices, intolerable to a pure mind, the sad phrase covered. Dora might long ago have moved to more comfortable rooms and a better quarter of the town had she been so minded, for her wages as an admirable forewoman and an exceptionally skilled hand were high; but she passionately preferred to be near St. Damian's and amongst her 'girls.' Also, there was the thought that by staying in the place whither she had originally moved she would be more easily discoverable if ever,—ay, ifever—Daddy should come back to her. She was certain that he was still alive; and great as the probabilities on the other side became with every passing year, few people had the heart to insist upon them in the face of her sensitive faith, whereof the bravery was so close akin to tears.
Only once in all these years had there been a trace of Daddy. Through a silk-merchant acquaintance of his, having relations with Lyons and other foreign centres, David had once come across a rumour which had seemed to promise a clue. He had himself gone across to Lyons at once, and had done all he could. But the clue broke in his hand, and the tanned, long-faced lunatic from Manchester, whereof report had spoken, could be only doubtfully identified with a man who bore no likeness at all to Daddy.
Dora's expectation and hope had been stirred to their depths, and she bore her disappointment hardly. But she did not therefore cease to hope. Instinctively on this Sunday night, when she reached home, she put Daddy's chair, which had been pushed aside, in its right place by the fire, and she tenderly propped up a stuffed bird, originally shot by Daddy in the Vosges, and now vilely overtaken by Manchester moths. Then she set round chairs and books for her girls.
Soon they came trooping up the stairs, in their neat Sunday dresses, so sharply distinguished from the mill-gear of the week, and she spent with them a moving and mystical hour. She was expounding to them a little handbook of 'The Blessed Sacrament,' and her explanations wound up with a close appeal to each one of them to make more use of the means of grace, to surrender themselves more fully to the awful and unspeakable mystery by which the Lord gave them His very flesh to eat, His very blood to drink, so fashioning within them, Communion after Communion, the immortal and incorruptible body which should be theirs in the Resurrection.
She spoke in a low, vibrating voice, somewhat monotonous in tone; her eyes shone with strange light under her round, prominent brow; all that she said of the joys of frequent Communion, of the mortal perils of unworthy participation, of treating the heavenly food lightly—coming to it, that is, unfasting and unprepared—of the need especially of Lenten self-denial, of giving up 'what each one of you likes best, so far as you can,' in preparation for the great Easter Eucharist—came evidently from the depths of her own intense conviction. Her girls listened to her with answering excitement and awe; one of them she had saved from drink, all of them had been her Sunday-school children for years, and many of them possessed, under the Lancashire exterior, the deep-lying poetry and emotion of the North.
When she dismissed them she hurried off to church, to sit once more dissolved in feeling, aspiration, penitence; to feel the thrill of the organ, the pathos of the bare altar, and the Lenten hymns.
After the service she had two or three things to settle with one of the curates and with some of her co-helpers in the good works of the congregation, so that when she reached home she was late and tired out. Her fellow-lodger was spending the Sunday with friends; there was no one to talk to her at her supper; and after supper she fell, sitting by the fire, into a mood of some flatness and reaction. She tried to read a religious book, but the religious nerve could respond no more, and other interests, save those of her daily occupations, she had none.
In Daddy's neighbourhood, what with his travels, his whims, and his quotations, there had been always something to stir the daughter's mind, even if it were only to reprobation. But since he had left her the circle of her thoughts had steadily and irrevocably narrowed. All secular knowledge, especially the reading of other than religious books, had become gradually and painfully identified, for her, with those sinister influences which made David Grieve an 'unbeliever,' and so many of the best Manchester workmen 'atheists.'
So now, in her physical and moral slackness, she sat and thought with some bitterness of a 'young woman' who had recently entered the shop which employed her, and, by dint of a clever tongue, was gaining the ear of the authorities, to the disturbance of some of Dora's cherished methods of distributing and organising the work. They might have trusted her more after all these years; but nobody appreciated her; she counted for nothing.
Then her mind wandered on to the familiar grievances of Sandy's religious teaching and Lucy's gradual defection from St. Damian's. She must make more efforts with Lucy, even if it angered David. She looked back on what she had done to bring about the marriage, and lashed herself into a morbid sense of responsibility.
But her missionary projects were no more cheering to her than her thoughts about the shop and her work, and she felt an intense sense of relief when she heard the step of her room-mate, Mary Styles, upon the stairs. She made Mary go into every little incident of her day; she was insatiable for gossip—a very rare mood for her—and could not be chattered to enough.
And all through she leant her head against her father's chair, recalling Lucy on her husband's arm, and the child at her skirts, with the pathetic inarticulate longing which makes the tragedy of the single life. She could have loved so well, and no one had ever wished to make her his wife; the wound of it bled sometimes in her inmost heart.
Meanwhile, on this same April Sunday, Lucy, after Sandy was safe in bed, brought down some needlework to do beside David while he read. It was not very long since she had induced herself to make so great a breach in the Sunday habits of her youth. As soon as David's ideals began to tease her out of thought and sympathy, his freedoms also began to affect her. She was no longer so much chilled by his strictness, or so much shocked by his laxity.
David had spoken of a busy evening. In reality, a lazy fit overtook him. He sat smoking, and turning over the pages of Eckermann's 'Conversations with Goethe.'
'What are you reading?' said Lucy at last, struck by his face of enjoyment. 'Why do you like it so much?'
'Because there is no one else in the world who hits the right nail on the head so often as Goethe,' he said, throwing himself back with a stretch of pleasure. 'So wide a brain—so acute and sane a temper!'
Lucy looked a little lost, as she generally did when David made literary remarks to her. But she did not drop the subject.
'You said something to Professor Madgwick the other day about a line of Goethe you used to like so when you were a boy. What did it mean?'
She flushed, as though she were venturing on something which would make her ridiculous.
'A line of Goethe?' repeated David, pondering. 'Oh! I know. Yes, it was a line from Goethe's novel of "Werther." When I was young and foolish—when you and I were first acquainted, in fact, and you used to scold me for going to the Hall of Science!—I often said this line to myself over and over. I didn't know much German, but the swing of it carried me away.'
And, with a deep voice and rhythmic accent, he repeated:'Handwerker trugen ihn; kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet.'
'What does it mean?' said Lucy.
'Well, it comes at the end of the story. The hero commits suicide for love, and Goethe says that at his burial, on the night after his death, "labouring men bore him; no priest went with him."'
He bent forward, clasping his hands tightly, with the half smiling, half dreamy look of one who recalls a bygone thrill of feeling, partly in sympathy, partly in irony.
'Then he wasn't a Christian?' said Lucy, wondering. 'Do you still hate priests so much, David?'
'It doesn't look like it, does it, madam,' he said, laughing, 'when you think of all my clergymen friends?'
And, in fact, as Lucy's mind pondered his answer, she easily remembered the readiness with which any of the clergy at St. Damian's would ask his help in sending away a sick child, or giving a man a fresh start in life, or setting the necessary authorities to work in the case of some moral or sanitary scandal. She thought also of various Dissenting ministers who called on him and corresponded with him; of his reverent affection for Canon Aylwin, for Ancrum.
'Well, anyway, you care about the labouring men,' she went on persistently. 'I suppose you're what father used to call a "canting Socialist"?'
'No,' said David, quietly—'no, I'm not a Socialist, except'—and he smiled—'in the sense in which some one said the other day, "we are all Socialists now."'
'Well, what does it mean?' said Lucy, threading another needle, and feeling a certain excitement in this prolonged mental effort.
David tried to explain to her the common Socialist ideal in simple terms—the hope of a millennium, when all the instruments of production shall be owned by the State, and when the surplus profit produced by labour, over and above the maintenance of the worker and the general cost of production, will go, not to the capitalist, the individual rich man, but to the whole community of workers; when everybody will be made to work, and as little advantage as possible will be allowed to one worker above another.
'I think it's absurd!' said Lucy, up in arms at once for all the superiorities she loved. 'What nonsense! Why, they can't ever do it!'
'Well, it's about that!' said David, smiling at her. 'Still, no doubt itcouldbe done, if it ought to be done. But Socialism, as a system, seems tome, at any rate, to strike down and weaken the most precious thing in the world, that on which the whole of civilised life and progress rests—the spring of will and conscience in the individual. Socialism as a spirit, as an influence, is as old as organised thought—and from the beginning it has forced us to think of the many when otherwise we should be sunk in thinking of the one. But, as a modern dogmatism, it is like other dogmatisms. The new truth of the future will emerge from it as a bud from its sheath, taking here and leaving there.' He sat looking into the fire, forgetting his wife a little.
'Well, any way, I'm sure you and I won't have anything to do with it,' said Lucy positively. 'I don't a bit believe Lady Driffield will have to work in the mills, though Mrs. Shepton did say it would do her good. I shouldn't mind something, perhaps, which would make her and Colonel Danby less uppish.'
She drew her needle in and out with vindictive energy.
'Well, I don't see much prospect of uppish people dying out of the world,' said David, throwing himself back in his chair; 'until—'
He paused.
'Until what?' inquired Lucy.
'Well, of course,' he said after a minute, in a low voice, 'we must always hold that the world is tending to be better, that the Divine Life in it will somehow realise itself, that pride will become gentleness, and selfishness love. But the better life cannot be imposed from without—it must grow from within.'
Lucy pondered a moment.
'Then is it—is it because you think working-menbetterthan other people that you are so much more interested in them? Because you are, you know.'
'Oh dear no!' he said, smiling at her from under the hand which shaded his eyes; 'they have their own crying faults and follies. But—so many of them lack the first elementary conditions which make the better life possible—that is what tugs at one's heart and fills one's mind! How canwe—we who have gained for ourselves health and comfort and knowledge—how can we stand by patiently and see our brother diseased and miserable and ignorant?—how can we bear our luxuries, so long as a child is growing up in savagery whom we might have taught,—or a man is poisoning himself with drink whom we might have saved,—or a woman is dropping from sorrow and overwork whom we might have cherished and helped? We are not our own—we are parts of the whole. Generations of workers have toiled for us in the past. And are we, in return, to carry our wretched bone off to our own miserable corner!—sharing and giving nothing? Woe to us if we do! Upon such comes indeed the "second death,"—the separation final and irretrievable, as far, at any rate, as this world is concerned, between us and the life of God!'
Lucy had dropped her work. She sat staring at him—at the shining eyes, at the hand against the brow which shook a little, at the paleness which went so readily in him with any expression of deep emotion. Never had he so spoken to her before; never, all these years. In general no one shrank more than he from 'high phrases;' no one was more anxious than he to give all philanthropic talk a shrewd business-like aspect, which might prevent questions as to what lay beneath.
Her heart fluttered a little.
'David!' she broke out, 'what is it you believe? You know Dora thinks you believe nothing.'
'Does she?' he said, with evident shrinking. 'No, I don't think she does.'
Lucy instinctively moved her chair closer to him, and laid her head against his knee.
'Yes, she does. But I don't mind about that. I just wish you'd tell me why you believe in God, when you won't go to church, and when you think Jesus was just—just a man.'
She drew her breath quickly. She was making a first voyage of discovery in her husband's deepest mind, and she was astonished at her own venturesomeness.
He put out a hand and touched her hair.
'I can't read Nature and life any other way,' he said at last, after a silence. 'There seems to me something in myself, and in other human beings, which is beyond Nature—which, instead of being made by Nature, is the condition of our knowing there is a Nature at all. This something—reason, consciousness, soul, call it what you will—unites us to the world; for everywhere in the world reason is at home, and gradually finds itself; it makes us aware of a great order in which we move; it breaks down the barriers of sense between us and the absolute consciousness, the eternal life—"not ourselves," yet in us and akin to us!—whence, if there is any validity in human logic, that order must spring. And so, in its most perfect work, it carries us to God—it bids us claim our sonship—it gives us hope of immortality!'
His voice had the vibrating intensity of prayer. Lucy hardly understood what he said at all, but the tears came into her eyes as she sat hiding them against his knee.
'But what makes you think God is good—that He cares anything about us?' she said softly.
'Well—I look back on human life, and I ask what reason—which is the Divine Life communicated to us, striving to fulfil itself in us—has done, what light it throws upon its "great Original." And then I see that it has gradually expressed itself in law, in knowledge, in love; that it has gradually learnt, under the pressure of something which is itself and not itself, that to be gained life must be lost; that beauty, truth, love, are the realities which abide. Goodness has slowly proved itself in the world,—is every day proving itself,—like a light broadening in darkness!—to be that to which reason tends, in which it realises itself. And, if so, goodness here, imperfect and struggling as we see it always, must be the mere shadow and hint of that goodness which is in God!—and the utmost we can conceive of human tenderness, holiness, truth, though it tell us all we know, can yet suggest to us only the minutest fraction of what must be the Divine tenderness,—holiness,—truth.'
There was a silence.
'But this,' he added after a bit, 'is not to be proved by argument, though argument is necessary and inevitable, the mind being what it is. It can only be proved by living,—by taking it into our hearts, —by every little victory we gain over the evil self.'
The fire burnt quietly beside them. Everything was still in the house. Nothing stirred but their own hearts.
At last Lucy looked up quickly.
'I am glad,' she said with a kind of sob—'glad you think God loves us, and, if Sandy and I were to die, you would find us again.'
Instead of answering, he bent forward quickly and kissed her. She gave a little shrinking movement.
'Oh! that poor cheek!' he said remorsefully; 'did I touch it? I hope Dr. Mildmay won't forget to-morrow.'
'Oh! never mind about it,' she said, half impatiently. 'David!'
Her little thin face twitched and trembled. He was puzzled by her sudden change of expression, her agitation.
'David!—you know—you know what Louie said. I want you to tell me whether she—she meant anything.'
He gave a little start, then he understood perfectly.
'My dear wife,' he said, laying his hand on hers, which were crossed on his knee.
She waited breathlessly.
'You shall know all there is to know,' he said at last, with an effort. 'I thought perhaps you would have questioned me directly after that scene, and I would have told you; but as you did not, I could not bring myself to begin. What Louie said had to do with things that happened a year before I asked you to be my wife. When I spoke to you, they were dead and gone. The girl herself—was married. It was her story as well as my own, and it seemed to concern no one else in the world—not even you, dear. So I thought then, any way. Since, I have often wondered whether I was right.'
'Was it when you were in Paris?' she asked sharply.
He gave a sign of assent.
'I thought so!' she cried, drawing her breath. 'I always said there was more than being ill. I said so to Dora. Well, tell me—tell me at once! What was she like? Was she young, and good-looking?'
He could not help smiling at her—there was something so childish in her jealous curiosity.
'Let me tell you in order,' he said, 'and then we will both put it out of sight—at least, till I see Louie again.'
His heavy sigh puzzled her. But her strained and eager eyes summoned him to begin.
He told her everything, with singular simplicity and frankness. To Lucy it was indeed a critical and searching moment! No wife, whatever stuff she may be made of, can listen to such a story for the first time, from the husband she loves and respects, without passing thereafter into a new state of consciousness towards him. Sometimes she could hardly realise at all that it applied to David, this tale of passion he was putting, with averted face, into these short and sharp sentences. That conception of him which the daily life of eight years, with its growing self-surrender, its expanding spiritual force, had graven on her mind, clashed so oddly with all that he was saying! A certain desolate feeling, too large and deep in all its issues to be harboured long in her slight nature, came over her now and then. She had been so near to him all these years, and had yet known nothing. It was the separateness of the individual lot—that awful and mysterious chasm which divides even lover from lover—which touched her here and there like a cold hand, from which she shrank.
She grew a little cold and pale when he spoke of his weeks of despair, of the death from which Ancrum had rescued him. But any ordinary prudish word of blame, even for his silence towards her, never occurred to her. Once she asked him a wistful question:—
'You and she thought that marrying didn't matter at all when people loved each other—that nobody had a right to interfere? Do you think that now, David?'
'No,' he said, with deep emphasis. 'No.—I have come to think the most disappointing and hopeless marriage, nobly borne, to be better worth having than what people call an "ideal passion,"—if the ideal passion must be enjoyed at the expense of one of those fundamental rules which poor human nature has worked out, with such infinite difficulty and pain, for the protection and help of its own weakness. I did not know it,—but, so far as in me lay, I was betraying and injuring that society which has given me all I have.'
She sat silent. 'The most disappointing marriage.' An echo from that overheard talk at Benet's Park floated through her mind. She winced, and shrank, even as she realised his perfect innocence of any such reference.
Then, with eagerness, she threw herself into innumerable questions about Elise—her looks, her motives, the details of what she said and did. Beneath the satisfaction of her curiosity, of course, there was all the time a pang—a pang not to be silenced. In her flights of idle fancy she had often suspected something not unlike the truth, basing her conjecture on the mystery which had always hung round that Paris visit, partly on the world's general experience of what happened to handsome young men. For, in her heart of hearts, had there not lurked all the time a wonder which was partly self-judgment? Had David, with such a temperament, never been more deeply moved than she knew herself to have moved him? More than once a secret inarticulate suspicion of this kind had crossed her. The poorest and shallowest soul may have these flashes of sad insight, under the kindling of its affections.
But now she knew, and the difference was vast. After she had asked all her questions, and delivered a vehement protest against the tenacity of his self-reproach with regard to Louie—for what decent girl need go wrong unless she has a mind to?—she laid her head down again on David's knee.
'I don't think she cared much about you—I'm sure she couldn't have,' she said slowly, finding a certain pleasure in the words.
David did not answer. He was sunk in memory. How far away lay that world of art and the artist from this dusty, practical life in which he was now immersed! At no time had he been really akin to it. The only art to which he was naturally susceptible was the art of oratory and poetry. Elise had created in him an artificial taste, which had died with his passion. Yet now, as his quickened mind lingered in the past, he felt a certain wide philosophic regret for the complete divorce which had come about between him and so rich a section of human experience.
He was roused from his reverie, which would have reassured her, could she have followed it, more than any direct speech, by a movement from Lucy. Dropping the hand which had once more stolen over his brow, he saw her looking at him with wide, wet eyes.
'David!'
'Yes.'
'Come here! close to me!'
He moved forward, and laid his arm round her shoulders, as she sat in her low chair beside him.
'What is it, dear? I have been keeping you up too late.'
She lifted a hand, and brought his face near to hers.
'David, I am a stupid little thing—but I do understand more than I did, and I would never,neverdesert you for anything,—for any sorrow or trouble in the world!'
The mixture of yearning, pain, triumphant affection in her tone, cannot be rendered in words.
His whole heart melted to her. As he held her to his breast, the hour they had just passed through took for both of them a sacred meaning and importance. Youth was going—their talk had not been the talk of youth. Was true love just beginning?
'My God! My God!'
The cry was David's. He had reeled back against the table in his study, his hand upon an open book, his face turned to Doctor Mildmay, who was standing by the fireplace.
'Of course, I can't be sure,' said the doctor hastily, almost guiltily. 'You must not take it upon my authority alone. Try and throw it off your mind. Take your wife up to town to see Selby or Paget, and if I am wrong I shall be too thankful! And, above all, don't frighten her. Take care—she will be down again directly.'
'You say,' said David, thickly, 'that if it were what you suspect, operation would be difficult. Yes, I see there is something of the sort here.'
He turned, shaking all over, to the book beside him, which was a medical treatise he had just taken down from his scientific bookcase.
'It would be certainly difficult,' said the doctor, frowning, his lower lip pushed forward in a stress of thought, 'but it would have to be attempted. Only, on the temporal bone it will be a puzzle to go deep enough.'
David's eye ran along the page beside him. 'Sarcoma, which was originally regarded with far less terror than cancer (carcinoma), is now generally held by doctors to be more malignant and more deadly. There is much less pain, but surgery can do less, and death is in most cases infinitely more rapid.'
'Hush!' said the doctor, with short decision, 'I hear her coming down again. Let me speak.'
Lucy, who had run upstairs to quiet a yell of crying from Sandy immediately after Doctor Mildmay had finished his examination of her swollen cheek, opened the door as he spoke. She was slightly flushed, and her eyes were more wide open and restless than usual. David was apparently bending over a drawer which he had opened on the farther side of his writing-table. The doctor's face was entirely as usual.
'Well now, Mrs. Grieve,' he said cheerily, 'we have been agreeing—your husband and I—that it will be best for you to go up to London and have that cheek looked at by one of the crack surgeons. They will give you the best advice as to what to do with it. It is not a common ailment, and we are very fine fellows down here, but of course we can't get the experience, in a particular line of cases, of one of the first-rate surgical specialists. Do you think you could go to-morrow? I could make an appointment for you by telegraph to-day.'
Lucy gave a little unsteady, affected laugh.
'I don't see how I can go all in a moment like that,' she said. 'It doesn't matter! Why don't you give me something for it, and it will go away.'
'Oh! but it does matter,' said the doctor, firmly. 'Lumps like that are serious things, and mustn't be trifled with.'
'But what will they want to do to it?' said Lucy nervously. She was standing with one long, thin hand resting lightly on the back of a chair, looking from David, whose face and figure were blurred to her by the dazzle of afternoon light coming in through the window, to Doctor Mildmay.
The doctor cleared his throat.
'They would only want to do what was best for you in every way,' he said; 'you may be sure of that. Could you be very brave if they advised you that it ought to be removed?'
She gave a little shriek.
'What! you mean cut it out—cut it away!' she cried, shaking, and looking at him with the frowning anger of a child. 'Why, it would leave an ugly mark, a hideous mark!'
'No, it wouldn't. The mark would disfigure you much less than the swelling. They would take care to draw the skin together again neatly, and you could easily arrange your hair a little. But you ought to get a first-rate opinion.'
'What is it? what do you call it?' said Lucy, irritably. 'I can't think why you make such a fuss.'
'Well, it might be various things,' he said evasively. 'Any way, you take my advice, and have it seen to. I can telegraph as I go from here.'
'I could take you up to-morrow,' said David, coming forward in answer to the disturbed look she threw him. Now that her flush had faded, how pale and drooping she was in the strong light! 'It would be better, dear, to do what Doctor Mildmay recommends. And you never mind a day in London, you know.'
Did she detect any difference in the voice? She moved up to him, and he put his arm round her.
'Must I?' she said, helplessly; 'it's such a bore, to-morrow particularly. I had promised to take Sandy out to tea.'
'Well, let that young man go without a treat for once,' said the doctor, laughing. 'He has a deal too many, anyway. Very well, that's settled. I will telegraph as I go to the train. Just come here a moment, Grieve.'
The two went out together. When David returned, any one who had happened to be in the hall would have seen that he could hardly open the sitting-room door, so fumbling were his movements. As he passed through the room to reach the study he caught sight of his own face in a glass, and stopping, with clenched hands, pulled himself together by the effort of his whole being.
When he opened the study-door, Lucy was hunting about his table in a quick, impatient way.
'I can't think where you keep your india-rubber rings, David. I want to put one round a parcel for Dora.'
He found one for her. Then she stood by the fire, as the sunset-light faded into dusk, and poured out to him a story of domestic grievances. Sarah, their cook, wished to leave and be married—it was very unexpected and very inconsiderate, and Lucy did not believe the young man was steady; and how on earth was she to find another cook? It was enough to drive one wild, the difficulty of getting cooks in Manchester.
For nearly an hour, till the supper-bell rang, she stood there, with her foot on the fender, chattering in a somewhat sharp, shrill way. Not one word would she say, or let him say, of London or the doctor's visit.
After supper, as they went back into the study, David looked for the railway-guide. 'The 10. 15 will do,' he said. 'Mildmay has made the appointment for three. We can just get up in time.'
'It is great nonsense!' said Lucy, pouting. 'The question is, can we get back? I must get back. I don't want to leave Sandy for the night. He's got a cold.'
It seemed to David that something clutched at his breath and voice. Was it he or some one else that said:—
'That will be too tiring, dear. We shall have to stay the night.'
'No, I must get back,' said Lucy, obstinately.
Afterwards she brought her work as usual, and he professed to smoke and read. But the evening passed, for him, beneath his outward quiet, in a hideous whirl of images and sensations, which ultimately wore itself out, and led to a mood of dulness and numbness. Every now and then, as he sat there, with the fire crackling, and the familiar walls and books about him, he felt himself sinking, as it were, in a sudden abyss of horror; then, again, the scene of the afternoon seemed to him absurd, and he despised his own panic. He dwelt upon everything the doctor had said about the rarity, the exceptional nature of such an illness. Well, what is rare does not happen—not to oneself—that was what he seemed to be clinging to at last.
When Lucy went up to bed, he followed her in about a quarter of an hour.
'Why, you are early!' she said, opening her eyes.
'I am tired,' he said. 'There was a great press of work to-day. I want a long night.'
In reality, he could not bear her out of his sight. Hour after hour he tossed restlessly, beside her quiet sleep, till the spring morning broke.
They left Manchester next morning in a bitter east wind. As she passed through the hall to the cab, Lucy left a little note for Dora on the table, with instructions that it should be posted.
'I want her to come and see him at his bedtime,' she said, 'for of course we can't get back for that.'
David said nothing. When they got to the station, he dared not even propose to her the extra comfort of first class, lest he should intensify the alarm he perfectly well divined under her offhand, flighty manner.
By three o'clock they were in the waiting-room of the famous doctor they had come to see. Lucy looked round her nervously as they entered, with quick, dilating nostrils, and across David there swept a sudden choking memory of the trapped and fluttering birds he had sometimes seen in his boyhood struggling beneath a birdcatcher's net on the moors.
As the appointment was at an unusual time, they were not kept waiting very long by the great man. He received them with a sort of kindly distance, made his examination very quickly, and asked her a number of general questions, entering the answers in his large patients' book.
Then he leant back in his chair, looking thoughtfully at Lucy over his spectacles.
'Well,' he said at last, with a perfectly cheerful and businesslike voice, 'I am quite clear there is only one thing to be done, Mrs. Grieve. You must have that growth removed.'
Lucy flushed.
'I want you to give me something to take it away,' she said, half sullenly, half defiantly. She was sitting very erect, in a little tight-fitting black jacket, with her small black hat and veil on her knee.
'No, I am sorry to say nothing can be done in that way. If you were my daughter or sister, I should say to you, have that lump removed without a day's, an hour's unnecessary delay. These growths are not to be trifled with.'
He spoke with a mild yet penetrating observance of her. A number of reflections were passing rapidly through his mind. The operation was a most unpromising one, but it was clearly the surgeon's duty to try it. The chances were that it would prolong life which was now speedily and directly threatened, owing to the proximity of the growth to certain vital points.
'When could you do it?' said David, so hoarsely that he had to repeat his question. He was standing with his arm on the mantelpiece, looking down on the surgeon and his wife.
The great man lifted his eyebrows, and looked at his engagement-book attentively.
'Icoulddo it to-morrow,' he said at last; 'and the sooner, the better. Have you got lodgings? or can I help you? And—'
Then he stopped, and looked at Lucy. 'Let me settle things with your husband, Mrs. Grieve,' he said, with a kindly smile. 'You look tired after your journey. You will find a fire and some newspapers in the waiting-room.'
And, with a suavity not to be gainsaid, he ushered her himself across the hall, and shut the waiting-room door upon her. Then he came back to David.
A little while after a bell rang, and the man-servant who answered it presently took some brandy into the consulting-room. Lucy meanwhile sat, in a dazed way, looking out of window at the square garden, where the lilacs were already in full leaf in spite of the east wind.
When her husband and the doctor came in she sprang up, looking partly awkward, partly resentful. Why had they been discussing it all without her?
'Well, Mrs. Grieve,' said the doctor, 'your husband is just going to take you on to see the lodgings I recommend. By good luck they are just vacant. Then, if you like them, you know, you can settle in at once.'
'But I haven't brought anything for the night,' cried Lucy in an injured voice, looking at David.
'We will telegraph to Dora, darling,' he said, taking up her bag and umbrella from the table; 'but now we mustn't keep Mr. Selby. He has to go out.'
'How long will it take?' interrupted Lucy, addressing the surgeon. 'Can I get back next day?'
'Oh no! you will have to be four or five days in town. But don't alarm yourself, Mrs. Grieve. You won't know anything at all about the operation itself; your husband will look after you, and then a little patience—and hope for the best. Now I really must be off. Good-bye to you—good-bye to you.'
And he hurried off, leaving them to find their own cab. When they got in, Lucy said, passionately:—
'I want to go back, David. I want Sandy. I won't go to these lodgings.'
Then courage came to him. He took her hand.
'Dear, dear wife—for my sake—for Sandy's!'
She stared at him—at his white face.
'Shall I die?' she cried, with the same passionate tone.
'No, no, no!' he said, kissing the quivering hand, and seeing no one but her in the world, though they were driving through the crowd of Regent Street. 'But we must do everything Mr. Selby said. That hateful thing must be taken away—it is so near—think for yourself!—to the eye and the brain; and it might go downwards to the throat. You will be brave, won't you? We will look after you so—Dora and I.'
Lucy sank back in the cab, with a sudden collapse of nerve and spirit. David hung over her, comforting her, one moment promising her that in a few days she should have Sandy again, and be quite well; the next, checked and turned to stone by the memory of the terrible possibilities freely revealed to him in his private talk with Mr. Selby, and by the sense that he might be soothing the present only to make the future more awful.
'David! she is in such fearful pain! The nurse says she must have more morphia. They didn't give her enough. Will you run to Mr. Selby's house? You won't find him, of course—he is on his round—but his assistant, who was with him here just now, went back there. Run for him at once.'
It was Dora who spoke, as she closed the folding-doors of the inner room where Lucy lay. David, who was crouching over the fire in the sitting-room, whither the nurse had banished him for a while, after the operation, sprang up, and disappeared in an instant. Those faint, distant sounds of anguish which had been in his ear for half an hour or more, ever since the doctors had departed, declaring that everything was satisfactorily over, had been more than his manhood could bear.
He returned in an incredibly short space of time with a young surgeon, who at once administered another injection of morphia.
'A highly sensitive patient,' he said to David, 'and the nerves have, no doubt, been badly cut. But she will do now.'
And, indeed, the moaning had ceased. She lay with closed eyes—so small a creature in the wide bed—her head and face swathed in bandages. But the breathing was growing even and soft. She was once more unconscious.
The doctor touched David's hand and went, after a word with the nurse.
'Won't you go into the next room, sir, and have your tea? Mrs. Grieve is sure to sleep now,' said the nurse to him in her compassion.
He shook his head, and sat down near the foot of the bed. The nurse went into the dressing-room a moment to speak to Dora, who was doing some unpacking there, and he was left alone with his wife.
The sounds of the street came into the silent room, and every now and then he had a start of agony, thinking that she was moving again—that she was in pain again. But no, she slept; her breath came gently through the childish parted lips, and the dim light—for the nurse had drawn the curtains on the lengthening April day—hid her pallor and the ghastliness of the dressings.
Forty-eight hours ago, and they were in the garden with Sandy! And now life seemed to have passed for ever into this half-light of misery. Everything had dropped away from him—the interests of his business, his books, his social projects. He and she were shut out from the living world. Would she ever rise from that bed again—ever look at him with the old look?
He sat on there, hour after hour, till Dora coaxed him into the sitting-room for a while, and tried to make him take some food. But he could not touch it, and how the sudden gas which the servant lit glared on his sunken eyes! He waited on his companion mechanically, then sat, with his head on his hand, listening for the sound of the doctors' steps.
When they came, they hardly disturbed their patient. She moaned at being touched; but everything was right, and the violent pain which had unexpectedly followed the operation was not likely to recur.
'And what a blessing that she took the chloroform so well, with hardly any after-effects!' said Mr. Selby cheerily, drawing on his gloves in the sitting-room. 'Well, Mr. Grieve, you have got a good nurse, and can leave your wife to her with perfect peace of mind. You must sleep, or you will knock up; let me give you a sleeping draught.'
'Oh! I shall sleep,' said David, impatiently. 'You considered the operation successful—completely successful?'
The surgeon looked gravely into the fire.
'I shall know more in a week or so,' he said. 'I have never disguised from you, Mr. Grieve, how serious and difficult the case was. Still, we have done what was right—we can but wait for the issue.'
An hour later Dora looked into the sitting-room, and said softly:—
'She would like to see you, David.'
He went in, holding his breath. There was a night-light in the room, and her face was lying in deep shadow.
He knelt down beside her, and kissed her hand.
'My darling!' he said—and his voice was quite firm and steady—'are you easier now?'
'Yes,' she said faintly. 'Where are you going to sleep?'
'In a room just beyond Dora's room. She could make me hear in a moment if you wanted me.'
Then, as he looked closer, he saw that about her head was thrown the broad white lace scarf she had worn round her neck on the journey up. And as he bent to her, she suddenly opened her languid eyes, and gazed at him full. For the moment it was as though she were given back to him.
'I made Dora put it on,' she said feebly, moving her hand towards the lace. 'Does it hide all those nasty bandages?'
'Yes. I can't see them at all.'
'Is it pretty?'
The little gleam of a smile nearly broke down his self-command.
'Very,' he said, with a quivering lip.
She closed her eyes again.
'Oh! I hope Lizzie will look after Sandy,' she said after a while, with a long sigh.
Not a word now of wilfulness, of self-assertion! After the sullenness and revolt of the day before, which had lasted intermittently almost up to the coming of the doctors, nothing could be more speaking, more pathetic, than this helpless acquiescence.
'I mustn't stay with you,' he said. 'You ought to be going to sleep again. Nurse will give you something if you can't.'
'I'm quite comfortable,' she said, sleepily. 'There isn't any pain.'
And she seemed to pass quickly and easily into sleep as he sat looking at her.
An hour or two later, Dora, who could not sleep from the effects of fatigue and emotion, was lying in her uncomfortable stretcher-bed, thinking with a sort of incredulity of all that had passed since David's telegram had reached her the day before, or puzzling herself to know how her employers could possibly spare her for another three or four days' holiday, when she was startled by some recurrent sounds from the room beyond her own. David was sleeping there, and Dora, with her woman's quickness, had at once perceived that the partition between them was very thin, and had been as still as a mouse in going to bed.
The sound alarmed her, though she could not make it out. Instinctively she put her ear to the wall. After a minute or two she hastily moved away, and hiding her head under the bedclothes, fell to soft crying and praying.
For it was the deep rending sound of suppressed weeping, the weeping of a strong man who believes himself alone with his grief and with God. That she should have heard it at all filled her with a sort of shame.
Things, however, looked much brighter on the following morning. The wound caused by the operation was naturally sore and stiff, and the dressing was painful; but when the doctor's visit was over, and Lucy was lying in the halo of her white scarf on her fresh pillows, in a room which Dora and the nurse had made daintily neat and straight, her own cheerfulness was astonishing. She made Dora go out and get her some patterns for Sandy's summer suits, and when they came she lay turning them over from time to time, or weakly twisting first one and then another round her finger. She was, of course, perpetually anxious to know when she would be well, and whether the scar would be very bad; but on the whole she was a docile and promising patient, and she even began to see some gleams of virtue in Mr. Selby, for whom at first she had taken the strongest dislike.
Meanwhile, David, haunted always by a horrible knowledge which was hid from her, could get nothing decided for the future out of the doctors.
'We must wait,' said Mr. Selby; 'for the present all is healing well, but I wish we could get up her general strength. It must have been running down badly of late.'
Whereupon David was left reproaching himself for blindness and neglect, the real truth being that, with any one of Lucy's thin elastic frame and restless temperament, a good deal of health-degeneration may go on without its becoming conspicuous.
A few days passed. Dora was forced to go back to work; but as she was to take up her quarters at the Merton Road house, and to write long accounts of Sandy to his mother every day, Lucy saw her depart with considerable equanimity. Dora left her patient on the sofa, a white and ghostly figure, but already talking eagerly of returning to Manchester in a week. When she heard the cab roll off, Lucy lay back on her cushions and counted the minutes till David should come in from the British Museum, whither, because of her improvement, he had gone to clear up one or two bibliographical points. She caressed the thought of being left alone with him, except for the nurse—left to that tender and special care he was bestowing on her so richly, and through which she seemed to hold and know him afresh.
When he came in she reproached him for being late, and both enjoyed and scouted his pleas in answer.
'Well, I don't care,' she said obstinately; 'I wanted you.'
Then she heaved a long sigh.
'David, I made nurse let me look at the horrid place this morning. I shall always be a fright—it's no good.'
But he knew her well enough to perceive that she was not really very downcast, and that she had already devised ways and means of hiding the mark as much as possible.
'It doesn't hurt or trouble you at all?' he asked her anxiously.
'No, of course not,' she said impatiently. 'It's getting well. Do ask nurse to bring me my tea.'
The nurse brought it, and she and David spoiled their invalid with small attentions.
'It's nice being waited on,' said Lucy when it was over, settling herself to rest with a little sigh of sensuous satisfaction.
Another week passed, and all seemed to be doing well, though Mr. Selby would say nothing as yet of allowing her to move. Then came a night when she was restless; and in the morning the wound troubled her, and she was extremely irritable and depressed. The moment the nurse gave him the news at his door in the early morning, David's face changed. He dressed, and went off for Mr. Selby, who came at once.
'Yes,' he said gravely, after his visit, as he shut the folding-doors of Lucy's room behind him—'yes, I am sorry to say there is a return. Now the question is, what to do.'
He came and stood by the fireplace, legs apart, head down, debating with himself. David, haggard and unshorn, watched him helplessly.
'We could operate again,' he said thoughtfully, 'but it would cut her about terribly. And I can't disguise from you, Mr. Grieve'—as he raised his head and caught sight of his companion his tone softened insensibly—'that, in my opinion, it would be all but useless. I more than suspect, from my observation to-day, that there are already secondary growths in the lung. Probably they have been there for some time.'
There was a silence.
'Then we can do nothing,' said David.
'Nothing effectual, alas!' said the doctor, slowly. 'Palliatives, of course, we can use, of many kinds. But there will not be much pain.'
'Will it be long?'
David was standing with his back to the doctor, looking out of window, and Mr. Selby only just heard the words.
'I fear it will be a rapid case,' he said reluctantly. 'This return is rapid, and there are many indications this morning I don't like. But don't wish it prolonged, my dear sir!—have courage for her and yourself.'
The words were not mere platitudes—the soul of a good man looked from the clear and masterful eyes. He described the directions he had left with the nurse, and promised to come again in the evening. Then he grasped David's hand, and would have gone away quickly. But David, following him mechanically to the door, suddenly recollected himself.
'Could we move her?' he asked; 'she may crave to get home, or to some warm place.'
'Yes, you can move her,' the doctor said, decidedly. 'With an invalid-carriage and a nurse you can do it. We will talk about it when I come again to-night.'
'A ghastly case,' he was saying to himself as he went downstairs, 'and, thank heaven! a rare one. Strange and mysterious thing it is, with its ghoulish preference for the young. Poor thing! poor thing! and yesterday she was so cheerful—she would tell me all about her boy.'